If you’ve been growing vegetables and herbs for any length of time, you know you have to use them or lose them. 

Because I hate to waste a single leaf that I’ve worked so hard to grow, I was delighted to find an online cooking school with recipes for using just about everything that I plant and grow. The Almost Vegan Cooking School offers vegetable gardeners delicious new ways to use all their home-grown produce, and at a bargain price. 

Consider the first lesson, Our Daily Greens, shows how to prepare some of the most common greens gardeners grow in their gardens. It’s an extra bonus these greens are some of the most nutrient dense foods around.

Recipes use spinach, mustard greens, collard greens, kale, Swiss chard and fresh herbs. If you’re looking for a way to make the most of the vast quantities of fresh mint you grow, whirl some into a Green Smoothie with fresh orange juice, frozen bananas, mango and spinach.

Other nutrient-packed recipes include Savory Breakfast Porridge with steel cut oats and wilted spinach, and Spinach Orzo Lunch Salad that’s topped with garden-fresh herbs like basil, chives, thyme, marjoram and oregano.

Succession planting for spinach means you’ll always have fresh spinach in your garden to use for these recipes, or you can find fresh organic spinach at the farmers’ market or grocery store.

The Almost Vegan Cooking School almost wasn’t. If not for a challenge tossed down by her son, Debbie Devore might never have committed to plant-based cooking for her family.

After learning more about healthier eating in high school  – and meeting a girl who was already eating a vegan diet – he told her, “Mom, I think we should eat this way.”

Summer break provided an opportunity for a three-week experiment, one vegan recipe at a time. 

“Gradually it sunk in,” says Debbie. “I noticed I was starting to feel better, was able to focus more and was more energetic.”

She says she lost about 12 pounds without counting calories and her irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) issues went away, too.

Friends who tasted her vegan recipes encouraged her to start teaching cooking classes so everyone could learn how to prepare her tasty plant-based recipes.

Debbie says she knew she was onto something because “everyone wanted to eat my lunch.”

Now she teaches recreational cooking classes in her Centennial, Colorado, home kitchen, but she has a full line of online classes, too.

These beautiful, professionally produced videos are an amazing bargain. Each class is only $5 and comes with a downloadable packet of recipes. Once students purchase a class, they can watch it as many times as they want.

The reason the online cooking classes are so reasonably priced is to encourage everyone to try the recipes and then taste and feel the results.

“I don’t want anyone to hesitate when thinking about taking a class,” she explains. “It will change people’s lives.”

If you’re still wondering if you’ll like Debbie’s recipes, you can get three for free by signing up for the Almost Vegan Cooking School newsletter.